


Shuffle

by Grinner_H



Series: Soulmates [5]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe, Friendship, M/M, Romance, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-13
Updated: 2017-04-13
Packaged: 2018-10-18 10:43:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10615248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Grinner_H/pseuds/Grinner_H
Summary: For this prompt :When you meet your soulmate for the first time, you get a flashback/relive their entire lives(selected byAshfromMaster List of Soulmate AUs).





	

**Author's Note:**

> For this prompt : _When you meet your soulmate for the first time, you get a flashback/relive their entire lives_ (selected by **[Ash](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ashida)** from **[Master List of Soulmate AUs](https://r-evolve-art.tumblr.com/post/144380748003/master-list-of-soulmate-aus)** ).

We don't talk about the past, but it's there between us. 

I can feel it in this moment, trapped in the space between our seats, invisible-thin and guilt-heavy. My hand is a white-knuckled grip around the steering wheel. Tense; from fatigue, from memories unwanted. 

Memories that are mine but _aren't._

—

And I remember it. The day we met. 

My cellphone pressed to my ear. The animated sound of my best friend's voice through it. The night before, he'd asked his girlfriend how she felt about getting married. She'd thought they already _were._

Sometimes I think Izuna and Kushina get drunk on purpose, just so they'd have these stories to tell. 

And there I was, rushing through the Monday morning crowd, trying to make the ten-fifteen train. I remember the doors closing, the sound my briefcase made when I'd shoved it between them, forcing them open, forcing my way inside. 

And there you were. 

Seated between a woman typing furiously on her laptop, and a middle-aged man who was frowning in his sleep. I didn't think you were related to either of them.

You had your headphones on, lightly bopping your head to music only you could hear. I wondered who you were listening to. I remember the sway of your dark, untamed hair. The skull and crossbones you were sketching in the open notebook on your lap. 

You were a picture of innocence. Just this kid, lost in his own little world, oblivious to the world around him.

I remember looking at you, and I remember _remembering._

—

This is how I've always remembered you. 

You were - and are - alone.

I watched the way your fingers curled into tight fists upon your knees, legs folded beneath you on a wooden floor. I watched the painful grit of your teeth. The tears running unchecked down your ashen face. The air around you was weighted with despair. 

You looked… _older,_ possibly mid-twenties, though it was hard to tell. Grief is an unkind thing, and it has thoughtlessly aged you. 

But I _knew_ it was you. I couldn't explain it then - how or _why_ I knew. I just _did._

Like I knew that this was _your_ house I was standing in. It shouldn't have made sense. I was supposed to be on a train headed to Midtown. You were supposed to be smiling.

But somehow, incomprehensibly, it felt like _this had happened before._

I knew you couldn't see or hear me because I - the man I am _now,_ not the man I _was_ \- was never meant to be there. These were _your_ memories, _your_ life, that I was intruding upon. 

And like a scene out of a movie, I watched you. 

I watched you break, watched you mourn for the man before you. I knew that he was dead. I knew that he was your brother. I knew that, in this bizarre movie-memory life, we weren't friends.

—

That day on the train, four years before now, you looked up at me and caught me staring. 

Your eyes went wide. Confusion bleeding to recognition to awareness. Your book slipped from your lap. I caught it before it hit the floor. 

And in that moment, I knew you remembered me too.

—

_"Why didn't you tell me you had a brother?"_

I'd asked Izuna this on our cigarette break that same day. 

He'd looked at me like I was a retard. "I _don't,_ " he'd replied in his _what-the-fuck-are-you-even- **on?**_ voice. "But you already knew that, Tobirama."

I never did get around to asking him how he died in a life that isn't his.

I never asked why he left you alone.

But I've always wondered, why you never got to bring your siblings with you into _this_ life. 

I still have all of mine. 

—

Back then, I had hoped that Izuna had these memories too.

But it's always just been you and me.

Just two strangers on a train, bound by some tragic, alien fate.

—

I like it like this. When it's just you and me and the road. Nothing but space and miles to go. 

When we get on trains, it's always 'cause we've got somewhere to be. But in this old Pontiac, we've got _everywhere._

You're slumped in the passenger seat, fast asleep. I watch you from the corner of my eye, the way your mouth hangs partway open, the way your fingers curl into the hem of your Holding Mercury t-shirt.

The rhythm of your breaths comforts me. You seem so peaceful like this, so content. 

In our other life, we'd never known peace. 

If we did, I don't remember it.

—

These memories, they come and go. 

They're… _snapshots._ A story of a life told out of order. A shuffled deck, with missing cards.

And I know that, for the most part, it's _your_ story I'm learning. 

It's weird, watching you grow up. Watching Izuna follow you around the way most adoring little brothers are wont to do. Watching you spar. Watching you laugh. Watching you watch him die.

It's strange that, in this life, he's more _my_ brother than _yours._

But I think that the strangest part of all is seeing you full-grown.

Seeing your dark eyes bleed to red and knowing that you hate me.

—

So. The present.

I pull over so I can take a much-needed piss. Wash my hands with water from a plastic bottle. 

It's not really my style, urinating by the side of a road. But these streets are blessedly empty and it's better than a dilapidated, filthy rest stop. 

The sun is beginning to rise. I watch it without you, leaning against the dark hood of my car and lighting a cigarette. I can hear you waking up. The open-and-shut of the door, the crunch of gravel beneath the soles of your Doc Martens. The rustle of your clothes when you stretch. Your obnoxious yawn.

"I'm starving," is the first thing you say, stealing one of my Sobranies, lighting it against my own. Your hair is adorably mussed. There is a wicked spark in your eyes. It matches the smirk slicking up the side of your pale-as-a-fishbelly cheek.

"You should quit that," I tell you, not really meaning it, knowing that you know that. Morals have never really been my strong suit.

"Yeah? Well, maybe you should eat me."

The light in your eyes is a ravenous thing. You tilt your chin up at me, cocky little shit that you are. The cigarette dangles from your lip like a challenge.

Fuck cigarette kisses. I pull you in for the real thing.

—

Kushina's voice. It rings in my head like an unwelcome warning.

"He's _sixteen,_ Doa-chan," she'd said last Friday, even as she'd helped me fit a case of Space Barley into the cluttered back seat of my car. 

It used to be, _"He's thirteen, fourteen, fifteen."_ Or, _"What happens when you tire of him?"_ Sometimes, _"What happens when he leaves **you?** "_

Funny how she's always tried to be my voice of reason. Morals have never been _her_ forte either.

But I don't want to think about her right now. 

Not when you've got your legs wrapped around me like this. Your fingers denting the flesh on my back. The heat of your cheek pressed against the crook of my neck. The heat of _you,_ pleasurably tight around my cock.

I can hear a plane flying overhead. I wonder if anyone can see us like this, if anyone's watching me right now, fucking you against the hood of my car. 

Your body is a slender, pliant thing; fitting so well against mine like you were always meant to be _here,_ in my arms, in this shared moment of staccato breaths and rapid-fire heartbeats.

Your hair is plastered to your forehead, your neck; damp with sweat. I wonder if - in a few years - you'd wear it down to your waist, the way you do in these shuffled memories that plague me like waking dreams.

Your cock is hard and wet in my palm. I slide the pad of my index finger along your slit, even as my thumb caresses your underside, even as I thrust in a hurried, brutal pace.

The sound of my name upon your lips as you come is the most beautiful thing I've ever heard.

—

In another life, you met my brother by the riverbank.

He taught you how to skip stones, how to fight, how to dream. It was the closest thing to peace you've ever found, back when you were just this kid who was also a killer.

I wonder if things would've been much different, if it'd been _me_ you'd met instead.

—

Three years ago, I watched you die by my brother's hand. 

I remember the sound it made when he ran his blade through your back. Your blood that trickled down the sword's edge that protruded from your chest, dyeing it crimson. Shock frozen upon your pallid face.

I should have been horrified, maybe angry, maybe grief-stricken. But all I felt was… nothing.

I watched you fall. Numb, even as your blood mingled with the water at my feet. 

—

It was a dream. A _real_ one. 

I remember waking from it, shaking, covered in sweat. 

I reached for the switch on my bedside lamp. And there you were, bathed in dim light, curled beneath the covers of my large bed.

You looked too small and too alone. You also looked serene.

I checked your pulse. I watched you breathe. Ran my fingers through your hair, down your neck, your shoulder, your spine, and watched you stir beneath my touch. Felt the warmth of your blood rushing beneath your naked skin.

I didn't let myself go back to sleep. I just wanted - _needed_ \- to know that you were alive.

—

You've always hated anyone standing behind you. 

I guess, no matter how many lives you're given, some things just don't change.

—

Then, there are the gas stations. 

I watch you wander about, stretching your legs while I fill the tank. You crouch to pet a stray dog. Laugh like a child when it licks your nose. You draw patterns in the dirt with your shoe. Skull and crossbones, like that day on the train.

You are a picture of tainted innocence beneath the light of the setting West Virginian sun.

I can't bring myself to look away.

—

There are the diners too.

You spin around on your stool, this jerky rhythm of half-rotations. You filch fries from my plate, dipping them into your chocolate malted. 

From her place behind the counter, the waitress scrunches up her nose in apparent distaste. She sends numerous odd looks our way, but she doesn't try to make small talk, for which I am grateful.

I sip my sugarless coffee and watch you devour your dinner. We don't talk much or linger too long in places like these. 

It feels weird, when it isn't just you and me and the open road. Feels like the world is intruding upon our shared memory-dreams, even when we aren't remembering or dreaming at all.

—

"You ever wonder why we never see our future?" you ask between gasps and hitched breaths, riding me in the back seat of our car.

I run my fingers up and down your sides, thrust up into the inviting warmth of your willing, open body. I really like the way it makes you whimper, the way your fingers tighten their hold on the hairs at my nape. "Because it's the _future._ It hasn't happened yet."

"Okay," you pant against the shell of my ear. "You ever wonder if the memories we have are _from_ the future?"

My fingers find their way to your ass, nails breaking your smooth skin. I angle my hips; thrusts sharp and hard in the way that has you clenching and crying out like some dick-hungry whore. "Madara," I say, near breathless from all this heat and friction and desperate, choking _want. "Shut the fuck up."_

I love the snarl that twists your face into something so belligerently seductive. "Then fuck me harder, old man."

 _"Twenty-eight is hardly **old,** "_ is what I wish to say. 

But I don't. The words linger, hovering on the tip of my tongue and dying there.

Because here is a thought unwanted. I wonder if, in our past-maybe-future lives, we lived to see twenty-eight at all. 

You're frowning at me, undoubtedly noticing that my movements have slowed. "What's wrong?"

I can't unsee your face, frozen in shock and betrayal even as the light dimmed in your eyes. 

And it's… _wrong._

That you should ever look so cold. That the fire in your irises should ever be extinguished. 

I think that I might have stopped breathing too.

But then I feel your fingers splaying on either side of my face; warm, _alive._ My world shifts, centers, everything fading out till there's only you - _this_ you - in my line of sight.

My arms circle your waist, holding you close. I begin to move again; slowly, this time. I want to feel all of you. I want you to feel every inch of me.

And I kiss you because I don't know what to say.

—

There was a time we stood on a mountaintop. 

I watched myself yelling at my brother. But it was _you_ who turned to look at me.

You looked at me - _both_ of me - and said my name. 

It was the first time I've ever heard you sound so uncertain.

—

We're sitting on the roof of our car, beneath the cover of stars that blanket the Kentucky sky. It's cold out here, but the beer and cigarettes warm our bodies. 

Your head rests upon my shoulder. My arm, around your narrow waist. You smell like tobacco and serenity. Somehow, that comforts me.

Across the street, is a motel. I watch the _Vacancy_ sign that's missing its second _c._ Watch it blink like it's trying to rival the stars overhead.

Your voice breaks the silence. "Hey, Tobirama?"

"Mm," I mumble around my Black Russian. 

I hear you draw breath deep into your lungs. Your slow exhale. Then you turn to look at me. Your face is naked and earnest. There is raw honesty reflected in the dark depths of your eyes. "I'm really glad you made that train."

I brush the hair from your face. Gently press our foreheads together. And I breathe you in deep. "Yeah. So am I."


End file.
